Climate crisis and livable futures: Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopias and solarpunk fiction

Abstract

While literary responses to global environmental change have been varied, many have adopted a dystopian tone offering bleak visions of the future and thus helping to reinforce present-day perspectives and prevent action. In this essay, I examine texts that diverge from the prevailing apocalyptic mode and propose a more optimistic vision of the future: neither narratives of catastrophe and extinction nor eco-modernist tales of techno-optimism, these – what I call – ‘modest utopias’ sketch scenarios of livable futures beyond the Anthropocene. I discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s work as an important model for this way of writing and thinking about the future and climate change, focusing in particular on her Always coming home (1985) and some selected essays. Novels, as Le Guin claimed in “The carrier bag theory of fiction,” are best seen as medicine bundles “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (2019b: 933). Accordingly, my exploration of Le Guin’s works traces the relations they have helped establish in contemporary critical theory and climate fiction and examines the latter’s efforts to transform the present by imagining habitable futures through solarpunk utopias that are participatory, peaceful, and nurturing, and that focus on process and relations rather than on progress and growth.